


Come Talk To Me

by shirogiku



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 3x03, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, Episode: s03e03 XXI., Eulogy For Miranda, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, POV Flint, Season/Series 03, XXI., You Have Been Warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 10:31:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7357687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirogiku/pseuds/shirogiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Extreme fatigue and dehydration can lead to a moment of candour.</p><p>(Set before the famous shark-hunting date.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Talk To Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xJuniperx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xJuniperx/gifts).



> Written for [the prompt](http://twobrokenwyngs.tumblr.com/post/146612292506/some-silverflint-things-that-i-need-pt-1):
> 
> _During ep 3x03, when Flint is having his teary breakdown in his cabin, what if Silver had walked in? I have to know what would happen. I have to have this._

Grief is the wake that a smouldering wreck churns up. Grief is the bilge water gathering at the bottom of your soul, or whatever is left in its place. Grief sounds like the whine of a door that hasn’t been oiled, that horrible noise of a dying dog.

That's what her death has made him into, a hinge turning into rust. He blinks - and the flakes are once again just dead skin. He always used to have a bulldog grip on physical reality and the perceptions that he manipulated. Now the flimsy partitions has been knocked down; everything is bleeding together as though he has been stricken with calenture.

Unseeingly, he gropes around the half-empty shelves. He has left behind all the books that remind him of her, but that is not where her ghost has anchored itself. He wonders how she could bear it, that empty house, and how he could ever have begrudged her anything.

“Captain? May I come in?” Seeing as Silver is already standing in the room, the request seems like a hasty attempt to ward off his wrath.

But he doesn’t have the strength to get up and throw the fool out. Hell, he can barely focus his sight on anything.

“What?” he rasps out, coughing. His mind is already running through the list of things that could have gone wrong since he has left the deck. “Can’t you do a single damn thing on your own?”

“I heard-” Silver checks himself. “Well. Our conversation, it isn’t over.”

What conversation? The one about Silver being useless in a crisis? “If you don't turn around, walk yourself the fuck out and forget what you saw here this instant, I swear to God, you’re _next_.“

Maybe he should do it anyway, before anyone else learns of his pitiful state. He has had his fill of mutinies lately, and he doesn’t think he could deal with another one. But his hands are the first to betray him, trembling like an old man’s.

“It’s not even loaded,” Silver points out wearily.

When the lead wolf grows weak or too old, there is always somebody to challenge him. But neither Silver nor Billy on their own are anywhere strong enough. They will bide their time until push comes to shove. So this is Silver gathering more of his daily petty blackmail.

Flint steadies himself, holding the gun by the handle. “I’ll _throw_ it.”

He knows all Silver’s tricks.

Instead of fucking off like the clever bugger that he occasionally shows himself to be, the fool makes himself comfortable on the floor like he is about to tell Flint how he, Silver, is tired of _him_.

“You can’t kill me at this juncture, and we both know it. It would be the last straw for our crew.” Flint does not so much listen as follow the cracks on Silver’s chapped, bloodless lips. “And while I _would_ rather leave you to your bouts of madness, we can’t afford you slipping away either. Certainly not at a time like this.”

He lets out a jagged laugh.

Silver leans forward. “The men _need_ you, Captain. And I do mean _you_ , and not the grim executioner.”

“What, there’s a difference?” he can’t stop himself from asking. “And should you _really_ be taunting a violent lunatic?”

The nuisance rolls his eyes, of all things, before fixing his gaze somewhere past Flint. “ _You_ didn’t kill her.”

His whole body locks up.

“I remembered how you were after Mr. Gates's death,” Silver continues, with a hint of a smile that is more out of place here than a Naval uniform would have been. “The difference is, in Mrs. Barlow’s case, _you_ are not responsible. Accountable if you like, but that’s no reason to punish yourself for a nonexistent crime.”

He has bolted the door. He _remembers_ bolting the damned thing, so how has Silver got in? “You leave her alone, Silver,” he replies in a low voice. “Because lunatics can’t control their actions.”

Silver, of course, clings to his selective deafness. “‘I brought her to Charles Town,’ you might say. ‘I failed to keep her safe’. And you would be right!” He falters, amusingly enough. “But what you must remember is that Mrs. Barlow was your equal. She had made her choices, and she knew the risks.

“The hell she did.” Had she been aware _what_ Peter was, she would have stayed in Nassau… wouldn’t she?

_What do I want? I want to see this whole goddamn city, this city that you purchased with our misery, burn._

He has lit a funerary pyre worthy of a queen. Granted her final wish. But how can that ever be enough?

“I do believe you are doing that woman a disservice,” Silver cuts in. “Would she wish to see you like this, so wrecked over her?”

He _is_ wrecked. He is in so much fucking pain that he cannot even begin to separate the life that she should have had from the life that _he_ should have given her, and both of those from the tantrum of an abandoned child. So few things he has ever taken for granted, and the price of making her support and companionship one of them is too terrible.

Silver’s voice breaks through the fog like a beacon: “When you were about to shoot the thief, you hesitated. What did you see?”

Too bloody perceptive for his own good.

“Was it her?”

“It’s _always_ her,” he hears himself utter. “Every damn time since that day. I couldn't even give her a proper funeral. She shouldn’t have been in the sea. She should have been with-” Thomas. “People. And you know what she keeps saying to me? ‘ _Forgive me_ ’. Like it’s her fault she is gone.” Her fault he is so ruined over her.

Silver knits his brow in genuine puzzlement. “Do _you_ blame her?”

“She was a woman of her word.” Speaking hurts, and he never forgets that he can’t trust Silver, but there is no one else. “I have never known a nobler soul. She had made a promise to be there for me, and it shackled her surer than any irons.” He looks down at his hands, clasping and unclasping them. “I should have released her from it.” She had deserved better than him.

“But?” Silver prompts.

“But nothing.” He could not have prepared himself for this war on his own, and then she had decided differently.

“Would she have left if you had done?”

Yes. No. Maybe.

“I wonder,” is what he ends up telling to the ceiling.

Silver is fiddling with his boot. “Tell me about her. Not the gory details, the things that you wouldn’t want to bury with her. The two of your shared a love of books,” he glances at the bookshelf, “what else was there?”

Flint narrows his eyes. “Why? So you and Billy can cook up new rumours?”

He has heard it all - a witch does not die in silence or without flames. Who shall be the next bearer of Captain Flint’s death? Who will anoint him with blood? Is he nothing but a walking corpse now, a revenant?

Silver shakes his head. “I swear on my one good leg that nothing of what you choose to tell me shall leave this cabin. Is that acceptable to you?”

Interesting. Not blackmail then, but a foot in the door. Another hook in his head.

“She was a lover of light and music and poetry.” He will never hear her play Purcell again, he thinks with a gentler sorrow. “She had such a _filthy_ mind, and her mouth wasn’t much better.” He could have laughed at the look on Silver’s face. “She was the only real lady I have ever met.”

Would it be fair to compare her to Vauxhall Gardens? She would be both insulted and flattered. His thoughts are getting scattered all over the place again.

This is what happens when the rum stores run out.

“Enough,” he says sharply. “I’ve heard your warning, Mr. Silver, now go and look half-dead elsewhere.”

“‘Half-dead’ is good,” Silver has the gall to say. “It means there’s another half still kicking.” At a safer distance, he adds: “Are you sure you don’t want a hug? I can do that.”

Flint throws the pistol.

Three days later, they are out hunting sharks together.


End file.
